Shaun pointed out that his weekly Saturday Spotlight is meant to be the same thing as the mid-week F.A.P. The thing is, I came up with this sweet acronym and am unwilling to relinquish it (sure, until he gets bored in a couple of months’ time – Ed).

This week I’m offering up Bugbear’s re-imagining of its racing franchise Flatout as an interpretation of Namco’s racing franchise Ridge Racer.

Developers can put a lot of things in their games to try and get me to come back to them: compelling story lines, engaging controls, etc. But the only thing that is guaranteed to work is displaying some numbers that go up.

It is why I was so infatuated with Achievements, a system that encompassed all my games and gave them all numbers that went up and sat happily next to a little checklist, begging to be ticked off.

Ridge Racer Unbounded has lots of numbers that go up.

There are the obvious ones like the Km/MPH counter that increases as you accelerate and offers immediate gratification of seeing the speed stretch out the scenery to the vanishing point. If you go really fast you get awarded with a per-race number of points; if you drift then you will get more of these points. The same’s true of boosting for extended periods, destroying opponents, exploding landmarks across the track or finishing in the top three. These race scores tie in to an overall score that helps the overall number of races you can compete in go up.

Skill is thus rewarded but simply competing also allows for another separate number, assigned to experience, to also go up. Even if you do terribly it’ll allow you to unlock new cars. Each car has stats, yet more numbers, and these go up as you get closer to the top of the roster.

In one freak twist, as you come first in races a number goes down. This one unlocks more events with more races.

I could talk about the sense of speed, the drift-heavy racing, the AI that makes you part of a race rather than victim of a 7-man vendetta… but at the end of the day it is all about those numbers going up.

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I never paid Unbounded any attention because of its apparently ridiculous name. But according to my incredibly dull research the word has been in USian dictionaries for about 50 years. So FAIR ENOUGH THEN, whoever named this.

It sounds like this one has quite the overload of things going on in your face. Helps to keep you motivated, provided it's not simply overwhelming you with essentially useless data?

badgercommander

Posted July 10, 2013 at 2:09 PM

The second screenshot is about as overwhelming as it gets. To be honest, it works really well for this kind of game where you start to zone out all of the superfluous information and focus on making things explode.

The final sections were a bit of a grind, but the level editor is a lot of fun and there is enough legs in the game for people willing to learn some of its intricacies.

This sounds like it might have an element of the reunmoreishnessed of the good Burnout games – specifically in relation to the short games/obsessive counting element at least.

XBLA?

badgercommander

Posted July 11, 2013 at 12:47 PM

Nope it is a full disc title, but yes it definitely has the ghost of Burnout in it somewhere.

The craving for seeing those numbers go up and figuring out ways to do it, especially later in the game where it isn't good enough to just win the race, you have to win the race in style adds to that factor by a large amount.

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Arcadian Rhythms is no longer active. Damn was it a fun five years, though.

The site is staying online indefinitely. The slideshow to the left will show random articles from the archives, and you can see our final posts below that. Enjoy! Explore!

(Who are we? We like to play games. We like to talk, rant, expound and ramble about them. We are a fun-loving, quasi-intellectual bunch of gamers and writers with so many opinions we just had to share. We slip through our days in arcadian rhythm.)